Мик Херрон - Real Tigers

Louisa said, “There’s a number of message boards where conspiracy theorists gather to swap stories. We’re not talking Dark Web here, this is all out in the open—well, they’re passworded, obviously.”

“But we have the passwords.”

“We have the passwords.”

She listed some of the sites, to blank indifference from her audience, except Shirley, who nodded vigorously throughout.

“About a year ago, around when Donovan would have been released from prison, a poster calling himself BigSeanD crops up.”

“Is that what gave you the clue?” Lamb asked.

“Thanks, yes. That and hints at a military background. It’s not unusual for online warriors to big themselves up, but he makes comments that chime with Donovan’s experience. About the Balkans, and the UN.”

She talked them through it. To all appearances, “BigSeanD” fitted snugly into the online community, where the prevailing attitude resembled what you’d get if you spliced the DNA of an only child, a Daily Mail reader and a viciously toxic bacillus: an organism that was self-obsessed, full of pent-up rage, and sprayed poisonous shit everywhere. Symptoms included a tendency to lapse into capitals, the dismissal of all dissent as Establishment toadying, and a blinding ignorance of Occam’s razor.

“So what’s his bag?”

“It’s the weather.”

“The what?”

Louisa said, “He’s got a thing about the weather. He thinks it’s being controlled by . . . someone. The government. Them .”

This was met with a moment’s silence.

Then Lamb said, “Christ, and they let him carry weapons.”

“He posts a lot about Project Cumulus, a government operation in the fifties, which had military backing. It was all about cloud-seeding, artificial rainmaking.”

Lamb squinted towards the window, where the blind was doing a half-arsed job of keeping the sunlight out. “Yeah, that’s working nicely.”

“In 1952 there was a serious flood in Lynmouth, in Devon. Thirty-five people died. There are those, BigSeanD among them, who think this was the work of Project Cumulus. What was meant to be a demonstration of rainmaking potential got out of hand.”

“Fifty-two’s a long time ago,” Marcus observed.

“But the theories continue. There’s an American outfit, military funded, called HAARP—something about high frequency transmissions—which is reckoned to be developing a weather-control system. Floods, hurricanes, tsunamis—a lot of big stuff has been laid at their door. Man-made climate change, according to the webheads, isn’t a by-product of over-consumption. It’s a deliberate attempt to interfere with weather patterns. Specifically, to weaponise them.”

Shirley said, “That’s like . . . ”

What it was like escaped her.

Lamb said, “And there’ll be stuff in the Grey Books relating to this?”

“Well, evidently they’re a Looney Tunes jukebox. A one-stop shop for the conspiracy brigade. The Lynmouth flooding—there are still classified government documents on that one, the findings of a Select Committee investigation. If they’re included, that’d be exactly the sort of thing Donovan’s after. Apparently.”

“You don’t sound convinced. You’re not sure it’s him?”

Louisa shrugged. “It fits the dates. Like I said, BigSeanD didn’t start posting until Donovan came out of prison. I’m guessing they don’t let you have the internet in a military chokey.”

“No, the brass band accompaniment is punishment enough.” Lamb leaned back in his chair, always a potential Buckaroo moment. But its springs held. Staring at the ceiling, he said, “Okay. Golden Boy finds his career derailed, gets banged up for five years, and develops an obsession with X-Files mumbo jumbo. And now we have to help him get his hands on it. Have you finished fizzing yet?”

“Has who finished whatting?” Shirley asked.

“Give me strength.”

Marcus said, “He’s asking where they’re kept. The Grey Books?”

“Oh, right, yeah, you know how I found out? It’s actually on an email, one of those corporate-type Service catch-ups HR send round? With job vacancies and promotions and links to where you can find out about your pension—”

“Any time you feel like it, jump right in and shoot her,” Lamb said.

Marcus rested a hand on Shirley’s shoulder. “Where? Are? The Grey Books?”

“I don’t know, but a new off-site confidential info-storage facility has just gone operational where all Ops’s quote non-key data unquote is now being housed so they’re pretty likely to be there, wouldn’t you think?”

“You want to be any more specific about where ‘there’ is?”

Shirley said, “Out west of Hayes. That’s still London, isn’t it?”

“Depends whether you’re an estate agent or a sentient being,” Lamb said. “But yeah. That’s where they’ll be, all right.” You know what I’ve spent the past few months overseeing? Diana Taverner had said. Off-site storage for the whackjob files . . . He surveyed his crew. “Jesus. An ex-soldier with a screw loose versus you lot. A bunch of losers with fewer moves than an arthritic tortoise. Wonder how this is going to pan out?”

“We can take him,” Marcus said.

“‘We’ aren’t taking anyone,” Lamb said. “Reason being, the whole point is to let him get away with it. Or did you forget that part when you were out pretending to be the Sundance Kid?”

“Oh.”

“Yeah, oh.”

“So I got a little practice in. Keeps me sharp.”

“No, what you got was out of order. Next time you take my name in vain, do it while you’re sitting my medical. Meanwhile, when I give you a job to do, you do it. Even if it involves sitting in front of a monitor.”

“Hey, the job got done. Shirley just told you where the books are kept.”

“And I’m amazed she stopped talking long enough for us to make sense of what she was saying.” Lamb’s gaze swung her way. “I’ve tasted what passes for coffee round here. And that’s not what’s got you buzzing.”

“We’re technically outside of work hours,” Shirley muttered.

“Yeah, that was then,” said Lamb. “But as of now, you’re just technically outside of work.”

Marcus and Shirley exchanged a puzzled look.

“Christ,” said Lamb. “It’s getting so you can’t sack anyone round here without a phrase book.”

River, Louisa and Roderick Ho unconsciously shuffled a little closer together.

Marcus glared at them, then at Lamb. “You can’t do that.”

“I just did.”

“It’s unfair dis—”

“You disobeyed a direct order, not to mention forging my name on a Park register. And her eyeballs are still spinning from whatever she’s put up her nostrils. You seriously think you’ve a case for unfair dismissal?”

“You need us. Need me. How you gonna get Catherine back without—”

Lamb’s coffee cup spun past Marcus’s shoulder and shattered on the office wall, the spatter from its dregs Pollocking Marcus and Shirley en route. Marcus’s words were swallowed by breaking crockery, and the sympathetic ringing of the windowpane.

When the noises faded away, Lamb’s voice held more menace than the slow horses were used to.

“You went AWOL. She got stoned. Do you want to explain how that helps? Because you might have been hot shit once, but here and now you’re just another fuck-up and I am not risking you being involved while I’ve got a joe behind the wall. So take your glove puppet here, clear your desks and fuck off out of my building. I’ll deal with the paperwork tomorrow.”

For a long while Marcus stared at Lamb, whose eyes were cold as stone. On the wall, coffee dribbled a pattern between the cracks in the plaster; a new coastline being etched onto a map. Shirley snuffled once, a doglike noise, as if a thought had occurred to her, but she had yet to work out what it was. And then Marcus opened his mouth once, closed it again, and turned to leave.